Now that the Hollywood establishment has rewarded Joel and Ethan Coen with an Oscar and an unspoken agreement to stop considering them dangerous lunatics, the filmmaking brothers have returned the favor with their version of an ode to L.A. and the classic movies made here.
“The Big Lebowski” is your basic film noir detective story, filtered through the perceptions of ’60s burnouts, with a cowboy, a Busby Berkeley production number, an iron lung and some menacing German nihilists tossed in.
And a lot of bowling.
No, the Coen boys–Joel directs, Ethan produces and they share writing and artistic decision-making chores–do not make normal movies. But ever since their first feature, “Blood Simple,” a 1984 crime caper gone awry, they have been making uniquely humorous, artistically audacious films that have earned them a devoted cult following.
“Raising Arizona,” “Miller’s Crossing,” “Barton Fink” and “The Hudsucker Proxy” were all marked by brilliant, if cracked, dialogue, bizarrely detailed production design and vigorous but extremely controlled camerawork. Accomplished as those films were, though, the Coens did not receive widespread acclaim until “Fargo,” their 1996 study of murder and mendacity in wintry white Minnesota.
Maybe the Coens’ affection for the state they grew up in showed through, or maybe the world just fell in love with the colloquial, hugely pregnant police officer that Joel’s wife, Frances McDormand, played. Regardless, “Fargo” became the brothers’ biggest commercial hit and earned Academy Awards for Best Screenplay and Actress.
Not that that’s made the Coens entirely respectable. And, frankly, who would want them to be?
“I’m not going to name any names, but sometimes you send an actor a script that you really like and they go, `I don’t get it. What the hell are you doing?’ ” explains Joel, the tall one.
“One person we sent something to said, `I pass quickly and emphatically,’ ” adds Ethan, the Princeton-educated one. “He was a very fine actor.” You can easily imagine some folks not knowing what to make of “The Big Lebowski.” They won’t be the people laughing uncontrollably from scene to wry scene.
Set, for no apparent reason, during the Persian Gulf War, the movie is centered on two unlikely buddies: Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), an ex-college radical with no job, long hair and a dependence on pot and White Russians, and Walter Sobchak (John Goodman), a bellicose and belligerent Vietnam vet who runs a security products business.
The guys’ only apparent bond is their mutual love for bowling. Dude is as laid-back as Walter is volatile, but when thugs soil a carpet in his threadbare Venice apartment that “really tied the room together,” Dude finds himself embroiled in a complicated kidnapping and ransom scheme. It involves a rich guy also named Jeff Lebowski, his ex-porn star wife, his avant-garde artist daughter Maude (played like Katharine Hepburn’s snootier granddaughter by Julianne Moore), those German nihilists and their attack marmot, a Hugh Hefner-style swinger, a guardian angel (Sam Elliott) in a 10-gallon hat and assorted other weirdos.
Who are a change of pace from the weirdos Dude and Walter encounter every night at the bowling alley, played by Coen regulars John Turturro and Steve Buscemi.
“Raymond Chandler (author of such hardboiled detective classics as `The Big Sleep’) had this thing where his main character traveled around L.A., having all these vignettes where he meets different people,” Ethan explains. “That’s a product of the ’40s and ’50s, but we do it with these two protagonists who are casualties of the ’60s. All the characters in the movie are throwbacks to another era.”
“Even the bowling context is kind of a ’50s, early ’60s thing,” Joel notes. “And a cowboy! Well, that’s way out of left field.”
“That’s the 1860s!” Ethan chimes in. “I don’t know why that sort of goes with Chandler.”
The blurring of cultural references continues on the film’s soundtrack, one of the most eclectic in recent movies. Co-produced by the Coens and T-Bone Burnett, it’s built around snarky references to Creedence Clearwater Revival (Dude’s heroes) and the Eagles (who he can’t stand), but includes samplings as far afield as the Sons of the Pioneers, Meredith Monk, Yma Sumac, Moondog and Debbie Reynolds.
“All of the music is of another era, which is in keeping with everything else in the movie,” Joel says.
“It was a combination of our whimsical tastes and T-Bone’s understanding that each character had to have his own representative sound genre,” according to Ethan.
The sonic/anachronistic heart of “Lebowski” reaches its fullest flowering during the Dude’s dream sequence, a hallucinatory production number in which he teaches a Valkyrie-clad Maude how to bowl in a cosmic alley of chorus girls done up like dancing tenpins–all to the strains of the First Edition’s stupidly psychedelic “Just Dropped In.”
“That was a lot of fun to do,” Joel deadpans. “It wasn’t so much the idea of doing a Busby Berkeley number that was interesting to us as doing one that was choreographed to the music of Kenny Rogers.”
If all of this doesn’t sound like a put-on, nothing does. Yet the Coens insist that they’re misunderstood artists, even if they are congenital wisenheimers.
“Often, people think that we’re consciously commenting on genres or satirizing conventions,” Joel says. “To tell you the truth, nothing could be further from the way we think about it. It’s more that we’ll come up with these stories because we’re fond of that form of movie, not that we intend to parodize it.
“But just like everyone else, we let all of those influences from the culture that we’re familiar with seep into the storytelling.”
Are the more conventional minds of Hollywood more open to the brothers’ unique view of things now that they have Oscar cachet? The Coens wouldn’t know, really.
“I don’t think much has changed, either personally or professionally, since the Oscars,” Joel says.
“Except for Joel wearing jodhpurs on the set now,” Ethan cracks.
“We’re still doing the same thing, essentially, that we’ve always done,” Joel continues. “We are in a somewhat different business because we do our own stuff. We kind of play in our corner of the sandbox, and people leave us alone to make our movies on fairly modest budgets.”
The next of which will be?
“We don’t really know, but we’ve been working on a movie about a barber in Northern California in the late ’40s who wants to go into the dry-cleaning business,” Joel reveals. “It’s an idea we haven’t bothered to pitch to the studios.”
“Oh wait, there’s more. He wants to be a dry cleaner,” Ethan interjects with pitch-meeting fake enthusiasm.
“See? That’s why the Oscar hasn’t really affected our professional life,” Joel concludes.
